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The Keeper of the Bees

’em! If you do, I’ll hit you with this hose until I knock you spang into the nearest of the bees behind youl You don’t know mountain water pressure, but I can do it!”

“Turn off that hose!” cried the young woman, clinging to the side of:the incinerator and looking with bulging eyes at the two swarms of bees milling so alarmingly near, looking up at the air above her gradually filling with the roaring wings of bees scenting something they did not like, bees already nervous with the strain of leaving the hive in which they had been reared and following their queen to a new location.

“What are you trying to do?” cried Miss Worthington.

“I’m not trying,” shouted the Scout Master. “I’m doing! I’m going to have the truth out of you or I’m going to set two swarms of bees on you, and they will sting you until you are the dcadest of anybody that ever went dead, just the horrid way you ought to go to pay for little Mary. I know you! I’ve seen your picture! You’ve got it there in that incinerator. You ain’t the Bee Master’s daughter any more than you are mine! Your mother had you when she vamped him into marrying her. You are trying to play you are Mary. You are trying to cheat to get this yet. See ’em closingin on you. See ’em coming closer! Hear ’em roar!”

The terrified girl looked on every side of her. Escape was cut off to the rear, the roaring hose was menacing her in front. If she left the incinerator with the papers she had consigned to it unburned, there was no hope for her claim, no chance for any proof she had brought with her